Nick Land contemplates taking an exit provided
by the photographer Florian Reinhardt [1]
I.
According to Foucault, Kant defines Aufklärung in an almost entirely negative way; as an exit, a way out, or an escape route from the past, which he thinks of as marked by darkness, barbarism, and man's immaturity [2].
Funny enough, although Nick Land thinks of his own neoreactionary philosophy as an intrinsic contradiction to the process of enlightenment, he too is looking for ein Ausgang - only he wants an exit from modernity and from the age of Enlightenment [3].
Realising, however, that there can be no turning back, Land says that any form of conservativism is thus pre-emptively (and ironically) condemned to paradox – i.e., destined to
become a kind of retrofuturism; projecting something vital - but also
something lost, or forgotten, or denied that existed in the past - into
the future.
II.
D. H. Lawrence, who also sought an exit from the 20th-century and wished to step away from the light, understood this paradox better than most. His novel The Plumed Serpent (1926), for example, attempts to loosen the "aura of necessity and sanctity surrounding categories of the present" [4] and find some clue as to how we might live yesterday tomorrow.
Nietzsche too provides philosophical justification for taking what he calls a retrograde step once man has attained a certain level of enlightenment and emerged from superstitious fears and religious concepts. In other words, he has to recognise the importance that resided in old ideas and traditions and that "without such a retrograde step he will deprive himself of the best mankind has hitherto produced" [5].
Good people - the enlightened, who are afraid of the dark - will say this lapsing back into old life-modes that have been surpassed is a form of evil. Whilst that mightn't worry a Nietzschean, Lawrence was at pains to stress that this wasn't a "'helpless, panic reversal'", [6] but was, rather, something performed consciously and with care.
And, to reiterate: it's not a return so much as an exiting of the present into the past in order to enter the future.
III.
Returning to Land, we find a contemporary thinker who is prepared to express his disillusionment with the "direction and possibilities" of the democratic political order born of the Enlightenment. For Land, as for many neoreactionaries and libertarians, freedom - in the classical liberal sense - is no longer compatible with democracy and the expansion of a voracious welfare state.
And many of these people have ceased to care; for them, "democracy is not merely doomed, it is doom itself" and they are now searching for "something else entirely: an exit".
When you risk being eaten alive in what Land thinks of as a coming zombie apocalypse, then flight becomes the ultimate imperative.
Notes
[1] During a period of almost ten years, German filmmaker and photographer Florian Reinhardt snapped over a 1000 pictures on his iPhone of exit signs all over the world. Readers who are interested can find them in a book entitled Exit published byHatje Cantz (2021). Click here for further information on Reinhardt and his work; or here to visit his exit.art website.
[2] See Michel Foucault's essay 'What is Enlightenment?' in The Foucault Reader, trans. Paul Rabinow (Penguin Books, 1984), pp. 32-50, in which he discusses Kant's 1784 essay 'Beantwortung der Frage: Was ist Aufklärung?' (usually referred to in English simply as ‘What Is Enlightenment?’).
[3] Nick Land, The Dark Enlightenment (Imperium Books, 2022). The essay, written in 2012, is also available online: click here. Note that I am quoting here from the first part of this online version.
[4] William E. Connolly, Political Theory and Modernity (Basil Blackwell, 1988), p. ix.
[5] Nietzsche, Human, all Too Human, trans. R. J. Hollingdale (Cambridge University Press, 1993), I. 1. 20, pp. 22-23.
[6] D. H. Lawrence, The Plumed Serpent, ed. L. D. Clarke (Cambridge University Press, 1987), p. 138.
Dark Enlightenment 1: On the Politics of Hate (4 July 2024): click here.
Dark Enlightenment 3: On the Zombie Apocalypse (5 July 2024): click here.
Dark Enlightenment 4: On Rejecting Universalism (6 July 2024): click here.
